Client killing me - need advice!

[dstoltz]

I have a client who hired me to re-design his DJ site. He is adding venue pages for all the places he entertains - ok so far. When we discussed this page early on, he said he wanted to add "some pictures" of all the different venues. No problem. Each venue will have a different page, so that will allow me to have the pictures split out on all the different pages - 1 page per venue.

He tells me tonight, 2 weeks from go-live, that there's a little more than 4,000 pictures of all the places he wants to add! I tried to explain web page "weight" etc - also suggested he pick the "top 10" for each place - he just doesn't get it. He wants to add them all....

Are there free picture sites (like flickr or something) where you can "embed" the photos on the site?

Honestly, I don't know where to turn with this one - do I add thumbnails on the pages, with pop-out larger pictures? Will be a TON of work to do all the coding for so many pictures.

Suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[4Dante]

In the past I've used some flash based code that creates an online photo album by pointing to a directory and it then creates the thumbnails and the layout of each page. You should be able to just Google photo gallery code, or if you wanted a service that you can probably implement into the site, Picasa may be able to help you.

Good luck!

[simplypixie]

I really fee lfor you - sounds like a nightmare client.

Is the site (or these pages) database driven or static html?

[pritaeas]

You can integrate flickr if you do not want to store the images yourself. You'll still have to add coding to show them, but there may be scripts pre-built.

If you want to do it yourself, I suggest you add thumbnails to the pages (there are tools to do that for you). That makes it also easy to add an image popup for larger photos, and a slideshow. You can view an example of what I mean here. It uses PHPThumb, HighSlide and lazyload.

[dstoltz]

Thanks all for the comments - simplypixie - there's a small database, and I have classic ASP for coding....but coding really isn't my concern, nor storing the images...

There are 2 big problems in my mind -

1) Weighing down the pages...some venue's will have 100's+ pictures...even smaller thumbnails which pop-up larger images will weigh down the page.

2) I don't want to use flash, so I'll likely have to set this all up, and maintain the code - God forbid if there are changes in the future...

Here's what I'm thinkning of doing: feedback welcome:
Explain to the client that adding 4,000 photos, time-wise, was not included in the contract. Also try again to explain the negative impact of having so many photos on a page. Suggest they pick the "top 10" and perhaps at the bottom of the page link out to flickr to see more...

Quite honestly, no potential customer of theirs is going to sift through hundreds of photos on their site. my 2 cents....

[pritaeas]

no potential customer of theirs is going to sift through hundreds of photos on their site

This is an excellent point. Make him view the website from a customer's perspective.

[Baradaran]

Even displaying more than 40 pictures is not really wise. Noone will ever look at so many pictures. However, the client is the king, so why not give him what he wants? I had and still have clients who insist on getting what they have in mind. Satisfying them is a good idea, even if their idea is idiotic.

How about placing the pictures into different folders and let asp create a listing of all pictures, e.g. thumbnails (you can eventually use Persits aspjpeg). In combination with lightbox you can create a nice picture gallery.

In order to keep the number of pictures lower, you can either create a paging using asp or create an infinite scroll, which loads 20 or 40 thumbnails each time and appends the new thumbnails to the end of the page. This is way Google shows images.

[dstoltz]

The client is king, yes - but it's also my responsibility to help "guide" them to make wise choices for their site - this client is the type to come back 6 months from now and say "you never told me it wasn't a good idea to put 300 photos on 1 web page".

I will do what they want, but if they want to go down that road, it will push the go-live, and also would need to ammend the contract. I think that's the road I will take.

[simplypixie]

The reason I asked if the site was database driven was that I was thinking you could go with what the client wants but advise them that they will have to add all the images themselves (which may put them off anway :) ) and then you can load a set number of thumbnails / images each time a page is loaded and use pagination to go through the rest and this way the images won't all need loading into the page at once and your client remains happy. Just a thought (though I do completely agree that the number of photos is far too excessive and pointless but you may never be able to persuade the client).

[dstoltz]

great info - thanks for everyone responding! Gave me some great ideas!